It’s been 11 years since Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went missing while flying over the Indian Ocean. Malaysia’s transport ministry announced on Wednesday that it has authorized Ocean Infinity to resume its deep-sea search for the crashed airliner on December 30. Apart from small pieces of debris that washed ashore over the years, the wreckage of the flight’s Boeing 777 has never been found.
Ocean Infinity, an Austin-based marine robotics company, signed a $70 million “no-find, no-fee” contract with the Malaysian government in March. However, the search was called off just a few weeks later due to poor weather conditions. According to the Associated Press, the startup will now have 55 days to search for the wreckage across an expansive swath of ocean.
The 2014 flight departed from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital, with Beijing, China as its scheduled destination. But the plane’s course was diverted eastward, making a U-turn for an unknown reason. The Malaysia Airlines plane then headed south over the Indian Ocean before slipping out of radar and satellite coverage, then likely crashed. The 239 people onboard are presumed dead.
The current search area is the size of Connecticut
The toughest task for Ocean Infinity was drawing out a search area. It’s the equivalent of finding one needle in a dozen haystacks. There’s a chance the company could be picking through a needle-less haystack. The startup and the Malaysian government don’t have the resources to search the entire Indian Ocean, but narrowing the area of interest would significantly improve their chances of finding the wreckage. The initial search area in 2014 was 122,000 square miles, slightly larger than New Mexico. Ocean Infinity agreed to a similar deal in 2018 and found nothing across a Vermont-sized, 9,700-square-mile area.
When Ocean Infinity returned to continue the hunt earlier this year, it was with an emerging technology that helped shrink the search area even further. Weak Signal Propagation Reporter or WSPR, pronounced whisper, uses low-power transmissions, ubiquitous with ham radio, to parse out a flight path like following breadcrumbs. The company hoped to approximate MH370’s flight path by seeing where and when the flight disturbed radio waves. Ocean Infinity further narrowed the search area to 5,800 square miles, the size of Connecticut. One can only hope that search efforts are on the right path and the victims’ families can finally have some closure.
